Fleur laughed.  “Yes; and that’s what you won’t do, if you don’t take care.  But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself wretched.  There are lots of people like that, of course.”

She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned.  Was it Fleur thus staring at the water?  Jon had an unreal feeling as if he were passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to choose between love and duty.  But just then she looked round at him.  Never was anything so intoxicating as that vivacious look.  It acted on him exactly as the tug of a chain acts on a dog—­brought him up to her with his tail wagging and his tongue out.

“Don’t let’s be silly,” she said, “time’s too short.  Look, Jon, you can just see where I’ve got to cross the river.  There, round the bend, where the woods begin.”

Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees —­and felt his heart sink.

“I mustn’t dawdle any more.  It’s no good going beyond the next hedge, it gets all open.  Let’s get on to it and say good-bye.”

They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge, where the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.

“My Club’s the ‘Talisman,’ Stratton Street, Piccadilly.  Letters there will be quite safe, and I’m almost always up once a week.”

Jon nodded.  His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared straight before him.

“To-day’s the twenty-third of May,” said Fleur; “on the ninth of July I shall be in front of the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ at three o’clock; will you?”

“I will.”

“If you feel as bad as I it’s all right.  Let those people pass!”

A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday fashion.

The last of them passed the wicket gate.

“Domesticity!” said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn hedge.  The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster brushed her cheek.  Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.

“Good-bye, Jon.”  For a second they stood with hands hard clasped.  Then their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur broke away and fled through the wicket gate.  Jon stood where she had left him, with his forehead against that pink cluster.  Gone!  For an eternity—­for seven weeks all but two days!  And here he was, wasting the last sight of her!  He rushed to the gate.  She was walking swiftly on the heels of the straggling children.  She turned her head, he saw her hand make a little flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the trailing family blotted her out from his view.

The words of a comic song—­

“Paddington groan-worst ever known
He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan—­”

came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station.  All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with “The Heart of the Trail” open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of feeling that it would not rhyme.